The Thinking Dog's Journal

Chasing the scent of Love, Truth, Beauty, and Mirth, wherever it may lead.

Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Trump's Legal Mouthpiece

Jay Sekulow Has History

Right Here in Hampton Roads

A man identified as Trump’s lawyer has appeared on
national news shows of late. He’s not Trump’s only lawyer, but he is the lawyer
speaking for all of Trump’s lawyers. His name is Jay Sekulow. He has deep roots
here in Hampton Roads.

In 2001, as a contributing writer for Port Folio
Weekly, now defunct, I wrote a piece contrasting the AmericanCenter for Law and Justice (ACLJ) with the better-known American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU). The ACLJ, where Sekulow is still director, was founded
out of Pat Robertson’s RegentUniversity with the particular intent of competing with the
ACLU on most issues.

The article I wrote, reproduced below from my files (the
published article may have been slightly edited, I have no copy of it now to
verify), distinguishes the purposes of the ACLJ and the ACLU. This suggests to
me that “the Russia thing” is on course to become a clash of alternate
legal realities, making “the rule by law” a matter of opinion, not necessarily
a matter of justice for all.

The Port Folio article in its entirety as I
submitted it in 2001, appears below. Keep in mind that some things have
changed.

Whose Civil Rights?

The ACLJ v. The ACLU

July 10, 2001:―Every weekday at noon and midnight on
Christian Talk Radio WPMH-AM, "Jay Sekulow Live," a national call-in
program originating in Virginia Beach, offers legal advice to believers concerning matters of faith and its
public expression.

Callers typically complain about perceptions of religious
discrimination and censorship. Host Jay Sekulow gives each a preliminary
hearing, and if he thinks a case has merit he transfers the caller to his team
of lawyers on back-up phones to take the information for further investigation.
Three or four calls come in that way each day.

Between calls he plugs an Action Alert petition urging
the U.S. Senate to move forward with President Bush's nominees for federal
court judges. "We want the right judges in place," he tells
listeners. With 100 current vacancies, "You don't want to see Hillary
Clinton, Tom Daschle, or the American Civil Liberties Union appointing
judges."

Ouch.

Sekulow is chief counsel for the AmericanCenter for Law and Justice, or ACLJ, the activist legal right arm of RegentUniversity. His team of lawyers are student interns from RegentUniversityLawSchool.

Though not an official part of the school, the ACLJ's
headquarters are on the top floor of Robertson Hall, the law school building.
The two organizations have "a close, long-term relationship," says
Sekulow, which includes the opportunity "to train up the next generation
of lawyers on the issues."

Fifteen to 20 interns work at the ACLJ year-round,
part-time during the school year, full-time over summers. Forty-five per cent
of the ACLJ staff are Regent graduates.

This gives students "tremendous exposure" to
the workings of the legal system, from preparing cases for argument to reserved
seats in the visitors' gallery of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sekulow himself has argued nine cases there during his
career, winning about as much as losing. He lost two high-profile free speech
cases last year involving student prayer at school athletic events and protests
outside abortion clinics.

At any given time the ACLJ is working on 150 to 200 cases
through offices worldwide, including Washington, D.C., and Strasbourg, France. Its focus is on First Amendment issues involving
religious freedom and separation of church and state. Judging from Sekulow's
frequent radio bullets, its most pernicious enemy, among many, is the ACLU.

But according to Kent Willis, executive director of the
ACLU office in Richmond, the gap is somewhat conditional. "We both
promote religious freedom," he says. "But our interpretation of the
separation of church and state is pretty much antithetical."

That is, either group will defend an individual's right
to practice religion freely, but the ACLU, watchdog over church-state
separation, takes cases where individuals are confronted in public with
unwanted religious expression. The ACLJ defends the rights of individuals to
evangelize--that is, provide that unwanted expression.

The two groups rarely go head-to-head in a courtroom,
though, because each tends to represent clients bringing suits against government
agencies or other bodies, who retain their own legal teams.

A very different reading of the First Amendment's
establishment clause, separating church and state, seems to be at the core of
their antithetical relationship.

Says ACLU's Willet: "There is a breaking place in
law taught in the US, (that) with the adoption of...the separation of church
and state, even though much of law is grounded in religious
traditions...ultimately the law of this country is secular...and laws...and
judicial proceedings are all state proceedings that must operate under strict
separation."

RegentLawSchool Dean Jeff Brauch recommends the writings of James
Madison, saying, "That was far from the framers' minds--a secular society
in that religion has no part in public life. To say it's illegitimate to make
religious arguments in the public sphere is absolutely a misinterpretation of
the First Amendment."

Friday, June 02, 2017

The Great Schism

Listening to the Other SideWithout a Jealous Mind

So he did it. I thought for a little while he was playing
his “art-of-the-deal” game, keeping everyone on tenterhooks while he pretended
to be considering an extreme position. But no. He’s out for revenge on all the
environmentalists and the people who believe science is right about climate
change because he knows none of them voted for him and hate the sight of him on
their television and internet screens. So now he’s going to screw them, and
he’s going to rub it in.

That’s my left wing response. Here’s my right-wing
response:

I believe God
takes care of us, not the government, and I am sick and tired of all these
intellectual Ph.D.s and pseudo-scientists and so-called educated college wimps
acting like they know what the good Lord is up to with this weather business
when all they learned in college
was atheism. The government thinks it’s God, but it’s just a tool of the Devil.

---------------

You see, I decided to listen to the “other side.” I don’t
mean where my dearly departed Mother and Dad are, but where the right-wing
lives. Guided by a friend, I watched a video by “Coach” Dave Daubenmire, a
prophetic right-wing figure whose most recent hour-long diatribe calls on Christian
men to become more violent.

I get the logic. They hate liberals. Who are liberals?
Candy-assed feminist men, Jews, blacks and browns, journalists, and the highly
educated—Democrats, mostly, or out in Left field with the Greens and sometimes
the Socialists, giving our country away to Them.

What I don’t get is how taking up violence against the
liberal enemy is Christian. In my understanding of the Gospels, Jesus never
advocated violence against an enemy. But Coach Dave apparently sees a different
Jesus than I. He has his Jesus and I have mine. And you have yours, and she has
hers, and on an on , etc, etc. We all have our own idea about how this world
runs and who should be in charge, and Coach Dave proudly brays when Trump
pushes Montenegro Prime Minister Duško Marković aside to get front and center
among a crowd of world leaders posing for a photo. That’s how a POTUS should
act, he says. Show them who’s The Man.

He also stoutly approves of Republican Greg Gianforte’s
response to the Guardian reporter who asked him about the American Health Care
Act. Gianforte threw the reporter, Ben Jacobs, to the floor, cursing him and
breaking his glasses. That’s what a real man does to these girlie boys who
stand in the way of God’s Kingdom. And he still won the election! Montanans
know what’s up, they’re not fooled by this communist crap.

Coach Dave assures us that the Lord Jesus Christ was not
passive. He was a real man, a Man among men. He stood strong against the Powers
That Be. How many Christian men today will do that? But that’s what Coach Dave
charges his Christian men to do. No more Mr. Nice Guy. It’s time to get real
with these sissy liberal punks, give them the taste of a knuckle sandwich.

Coach Dave would like Ezra Pound’s poem about Jesus, “The
Ballad of the Goodly Fere.”

“No capon priest was the Goodly Fere,

But a man o’ men was he!”

Ezra Pound, of course, was a fascist sympathizer who
backed Mussolini’s rise to power in Italy. Some people theorize Trump is a lot like
Mussolini. So is this a pattern? Do admirers of manly saviors, like Coach
Dave’s and Ezra Pound’s versions of Jesus, tend to be fascists?

I was raised to see Jesus as a non-violent pacifist.
Coach Dave instructs his Christian men to be warriors against the desecrators
of their religion. We each can justify our interpretations by the Bible. Is the
Bible bi-polar? This is not a frivolous question. Is Coach Dave’s preferred
Jesus who drove the money-changers from the temple with a whip the same prophet
who said, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that
hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you”?

Who’s correct, which path is the true one? I personally
prefer the latter. Though I’m not a nominal Christian, I revere the Christ spirit
and the man whom we’ve determined embodied it. But how do I explain the
cleansing of the Temple? How does Coach Dave explain the Sermon on the
Mount? These are 2,000-year-old arguments, at the least.

The Real Issue

Leaving them aside, then, I don’t think the central
question here is who’s the true American or whether Jesus was a pacifist or
a warrior, calling us to turn the other
cheek or fight back. I think the real issue, less important but more urgent, is
the survival of the United States of America.

At present we are obviously not “united states.” After Trump’s announcement to pull us out of the
Paris Climate Accord, the governors of New York, Washington, and California
announced they were voluntarily and independently signing on to the Accord.
Immediately something like 100 cities agreed, and more states, municipalities,
and even major corporations are expected to follow.

It looks like “the great American schism,” which my
Facebook friend Stephen Schwartz has warned about for years, advances now
apace. But how can we carve two nations out of the present United States when the two sides, who may speak the same
language in name, are so divided geographically? The blue states will resemble
the Palestinian non-state, with their territories separated by hostile forces
except perhaps for the blue islands of Colorado, Illinois, and conceivably one or two others. And perhaps
there will be city states, as well—Austin, Atlanta, Charlotte, Albuquerque, and hopefully Norfolk.

My opinion, of course, is that pulling out of Paris is sheer madness, inadequate as the agreement may
have been in relation to the gravity of the climate problem. But everyone on my
side of the fence knows that, while on the other side, while they gloat over my
side’s anguish, they want nothing to do with remedies that will change their
lives. They want coal to come back for them. They say, “My grandfather, my
father, and all my uncles were coal miners, and I’ll be damned to hell if I’m
going to take a job in a pussy industry like solar or wind when all my people
for generations have mined coal.”

It’s hard to argue with people attached to family and
clan traditions where “progress” is seen as a betrayal of your ancestors. Those
roots go deeper than the concept of a general good and, of course, include “dat
ol’ time religun.” But not for me.

I frankly love the idea of “the United States of America”—United being the operative word.
That idea to me is bigger than either side, and it’s rare if ever in U.S. history when it’s been in full operation, where
everyone, however grudgingly, agrees. But to me it’s the one big idea we have
as a people: A union of totally disparate groups around the idea of Union.

It’s like a marriage in which the parties are determined
not to fail. That alone can cause parties eventually to love one another.

(The reason for that is a secret. It’s because all people
are lovable. Shhhhhh! Don’t tell!)

---------------

Coach Dave is a man who’s quick to tell you his age—mid-sixties,
I forget which digit. He sits as if at a sportscaster’s desk with an aerial
shot of an empty football stadium as his backdrop. From there, he rants, his
stubbly white beard and ball cap identifying him as an angry white man, a proud
redneck who also, he assures us, is a devoted disciple of Jesus Christ.

He’s saying Christian men have got to toughen up, stop
shying away from violence, and take the fight to the liberals, man-to-man.

Really?

I’m sorry, but isn’t this a little ridiculous—a man, no
more than ten years younger than I, about to hit his first heart attack,
cancer, or stroke—actually challenging me (for example) to a fist fight over
politics and religion and who’s the real American?

I saw two old black men get into an argument in Thomkin’s
SquarePark in New
York City one
afternoon in 1968 or ‘69. They were both obviously inebriated, staggering as
they faced off, fists up, taking ineffectual swings at each other as if waving
away flies, until one of them got out his pocket knife and threatened to stab
the other, who became enraged and resumed swinging while the other man poked at
his fists with his knife. At that point a third man jumped up from a nearby
bench and intervened, talked some sense to them both, and, with an arm around
each, walked them back to the bench, where they sat down. After all, it really
wasn’t worth the effort—two old fools too dumb to know they’re both standing on
the steps of the Exit. Someone—a friend to both—has to remind them.

A More Perfect Union

I grieve at the thought that we might relinquish the
great idea of a United States of America. Say it to yourself and tell me you don’t feel
something, even if it’s bitter.

I think of Thomas Jefferson, my favorite founding father,
as the architect of that idea when he wrote The Declaration of Independence and
also successfully pressed for a Constitutional Bill of Rights. (His only
indisputable crime against humanity was owning slaves, which he knew was wrong
but couldn’t give it up. I like to think it was because he was afraid he’d lose
Sally Hemings, who he loved in torment. For that I offer more pity than
condemnation.)

Jefferson conceived of a Union of disparate elements and Lincoln—to keep the chain going for a moment—insisted on
preserving that Union. It takes my breath away that we now see two sides
determined to tear it apart rather than admit the other side is American, too.
Who will keep the name if the schism really comes? Or will we just fight over
borders for hundreds of years like the Europeans have?

Jesus Christ, men! What the hell!

---------------

Here’s my take:

We’re all human first. And then we’re Americans.
Americans don’t have to love each other or even want to know each other. But
for Americans to argue among themselves over who’s the true American is like
those old black men, probably in their ‘80s, trying to settle an argument going
back so far they can’t remember what started it.

No one can win this red-blue/right-left stand-off. But as
Americans we all can lose if we don’t put United first and States second. To me
that means we’ve got to have the oversight of a national government. We’ve got
to have Washington to be our ultimate safety, our referee, assuring
justice in our Union among all Americans.

An American is a person born or naturalized in the United States. Period.

So if we give up the United States of America, as so many
are calling for, we surrender the Great Idea of “out of many, one,” which is
printed on our money as a reminder of our deeper truth.

It’s not just about accepting “the other,” either. It’s
also about accepting ourselves. We are the United States of America. TheUnited States. Unless we cast that name aside, we’re bound by
honor to meet its demands.

So I say to Coach Dave, on the very outside chance he’s
reading this, that though we stand on totally opposite ends of the ideological
spectrum, I know we share enough as Americans that we could have a few laughs
over beers in a country bar or stand together in a moment or two of awe at a
July 4th fireworks display. And I’m sure there are many other
examples where we live in a common America. Isn’t that proof enough that we’re both
Americans? Do we have to be mortal enemies because we have different ideas
about Jesus and how much government we should have overseeing our lives?

And more to the point, why do we get so angry that we’d
like to saw each other apart? That just doesn’t make sense. Are we having a
mental health problem here?

“What are you afraid of?” you ask your Christian men who
don’t step up to fight. But one could just as easily ask, “What are you afraid
of, Dave, that you won’t sit down and make peace?”

We’re going to need a third alternative, a peace-maker
who understands the great Jeffersonian idea of the UnitedStates
of America—“out of the many, one”—and brings both sides back together to the
park bench to sit down and remember the good times. Otherwise, a lot of people
are going to get hurt, before and after we understand what we’ve given up by
forgetting our one big idea.

Monday, May 29, 2017

Trump Abroad

Reviving the Boorish American

The spectacle of Donald Trump abroad last week reminded
me of the portraits of Americans abroad in the late 19th-century
novels of Henry James. James consistently contrasts the naive optimism, the
crass commercialism, and the clueless social behavior of his countrymen and
women with the sophisticated, culturally rooted, class-conscious societies of
Europe where the American nouveau riche was regarded as vulgar,
unmannered boors with an uncanny ability to destroy their personal reputations.

Henry James

The problem with that: The Europeans needed the excessive
wealth these American boors were looking to invest because their own exhausted
economy was buckling under centuries of war.

Not much has changed since that gilded age, except that
the boorish American has become President and is now toasted and feted among
oppressive regimes who appreciate his nihilistic vision of arms for dictators
and nothing for the people, ignoring existing western democratic values in
favor of a militarized, authoritarian
regime—the Trump Regime.

Meanwhile, in Europe, they see
that kind of a Trump Regime as a dangerous threat to the world order which America has led since the end of World War II. The Trump
Regime will spend billions for arms in the Mid-east but will significantly cut
what it spends to defend our democratic allies in Europe and elsewhere.

The New
World (Democratic) Order
of the alliance between Europe and the U.S. is over, it seems, or greatly modified.

The American World Order

I’ve lived all my life under that American world order.
It’s not utopian by any means, but it’s based upon democratic principles
developed in the eighteenth century by European philosophers and the American
revolutionaries who took the emerging Enlightenment ideas and ran with them to
found the USA, soon to become one of the wealthiest nations on
Earth, thanks to free enterprise, including slavery.

That untethered freedom to pursue wealth became part of
the unwritten understanding of what American democracy meant. In Europe old aristocratic families were the arbiters of social relations.
Everyone learned the aristocratic way of holding a knife and fork. But in America there were no old families to govern taste. There
were just wealthy families, who were the first to claw their way to a generous
helping of the newly developing American Dream. They were the ones who went
abroad, offending the delicate tastes of the Europeans at every turn.

Jala and I encountered that phenomenon when we traveled
in Europe during the summer of 1964. At that time the New
(Euro-American) World Order was just beginning to take off as
thousands—probably millions—of young Americans traveled abroad and got the
taste of other cultures. For us it was a transforming experience, simply
because, as unrealized artistic souls ourselves, we were blown away by the art
and architecture everywhere on display and available to the public.

Our life together as artists and writers and dabblers in
ancient wisdom began that summer of 1964 when the consciousness of our distinct
identities woke up. We ditched the American clothes we brought with us, picked
up some European styles in an Italian open-air market, and hitch-hiked our way
from outside Naples to Calais, stopping at every site where great art was on display.
It was a tremendously illuminating liberation from the bourgeois consciousness
of practical survival which permeated our backgrounds. With my college French
retrieved from memory and Jala’s pidgin Italian picked up from her elderly
relatives, we obscured our identities as Americans and were greeted in many
places as international citizens whose country-of-origin was not immediately
apparent. Like the man who sold us tickets to the carnival rides in Calais, where we were enjoying ourselves exceedingly:

“Quell nationalité,” he asked.

“Americain,” I said.

“Americain!” he cried, as if astonished.

“Oui,” I said, proud of not being recognized as an
ugly American.

We saw one of those in real life on our Channel crossing
from France to England on the very day after we’d enjoyed ourselves at
the carnival.

We were on the deck of the ferry watching the weather and
the water when our attention was drawn to a guy sitting on one of the deck
chairs—tipsy if not drunk—who announced to all assembled that he was an
American enjoying himself immensely here in Europe. He wore a semi-conservative, green-and-gray checked sport
jacket—collar open-no tie—and was about forty-five. He had his left arm around
a pretty young blonde in a mini-skirt, who sat on his knee, and in his right
hand—God’s truth, I swear—he held up a fat wad of American bills. “It’s easy to
get along here in Europe,” he said—indicating his blonde trophy, who smiled
on command—“when you’ve got enough of these,” holding up his wad of American
money.

So the boorish American still existed in 1964. We saw
others, but that guy won first prize.

Cultural Shock

The cultural shock came home more vividly, however, right
after we returned to America after twelve weeks abroad. Before heading back to
graduate school we stayed briefly with my in-laws on Long Island, giving us the opportunity to see Michelangelo’s Pieta
at the New York World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows. We’d seen his
other three in Europe and wanted to complete our experience of the
series.

Pieta del Duoma

Our favorite, which we went back to nearly every day of
the total two weeks we spent in Florence, was the Pieta del Duomo di Firenze, the Pieta
housed in the spectacular Duomo cathedral, which dominates the cityscape
of Florence, Italy, like a huge watch tower. Also called The Deposition and
sometimes Christ Lowered into the Tomb, this masterpiece sat not far
from inside the main entrance of the cathedral. There may have been a rope or
chain holding the public back from touching the sculpture, but otherwise we
were able to get close enough to see the chisel marks Michelangelo left in the
marble. It’s awesome to stand that close to such a work of artistic genius and
admire it at your leisure.

Vatican (and New York) Pieta

The fourth Pieta, transported to New York from the Vatican that summer, is the critics’ choice for world
favorite. The poignantly realistic sculpture portrays a limp, very dead Jesus
lying over the lap of his mother, whose face, with closed eyes, expresses a
serenity so subtly combined with grief that one stands transfixed at how
life-like cold stone can be made to seem. But I can’t say I got close enough to
the Pieta in New
York to have
seen that.

To view the American display we stood on a conveyor belt
which took us into an enclosed, chapel-like environment bathed in blue lights
with sacred music—think Mormon Chapel Choir—piped in from above. Twelve or
fifteen yards in front of us, at an angle of perhaps twenty degrees below our
level, the Pieta was displayed as if it were a sacred object in a Hollywood vision. Giving us perhaps a minute to spend with
the sculpture, the belt then spit us out into the crowd again at the other end
of the display.

And did I mention the solid pane of bullet-proof glass
mounted between the Pieta and we who passed by on the conveyor belt?

World's Fair PietaViewed from conveyor belt

(For the record, the Florentine Pieta is no longer
in full public view but has been moved to the adjoining DuomoMuseum, where it may be seen, along with other timeless art and objets
d’arts, for a small fee.)

It seemed to Jala and me that we were in a sense forced
to leave behind our new perceptions and perspectives on this enormously wider
world we’d discovered just so we could assimilate back into American life. And
we never were entirely successful in accomplishing that. Fortunately, though,
American life has transformed in the decades since 1964. Diversity, globalism,
expanded civil rights to groups once not only excluded but despised, have
especially advanced citizen sophistication in many areas.

Repealing the 20th Century

But with Trump we see a backlash to an age before any of
this happened. The Trump Regime is working to create a new gilded age which, in
a way, seeks to reverse the entire twentieth century, at least when it comes to
equitable distribution of the world’s resources. The idea that the Earth
belongs to everyone who lives here is some sort of heresy that enrages the
regime’s supporters. The supposition that personal freedom needs restraint to
achieve the greatest societal good evokes disturbing outbreaks of red-faced
rage. The suggestion that the Trump Regime is the worst of an uncivilized rogue
element in the American character—descendants of the criminals who poured over
here en masse to make a fortune from stolen land—is not welcome in our
current dominating political environment.

But it’s all true. All that’s missing is the realization,
not that America is at a critical choice between full democracy and some sort
of oligarchy or authoritarian hybrid, which it is, but that America is about to
lose its claim as the hope of the world because the foundations of our
much-vaunted and admired system are rotting and collapsing under the weight of
every person’s inalienable right to get rich, as Ronald Reagan so transparently
articulated.

Trump at NATO last week

Trump is the personification of America’s love affair with wealth, as our European allies
look on with varying degrees of pity and fear, not because wealth puts them off
but because Trump is vulgar, crude, and hostile in his display of it. As others
have pointed out, his admiration for the Saudi princes, Netanyahu, Erdogan, the
despicable Duterte, and of course Putin and Xi Jinping is striking compared to
his tense relations with our allies in the one-world international order we’ve
been committed to protecting and pursuing in agreements supposedly cemented
fifty, sixty, and seventy years ago.

Is Democracy Sacred?

It’s fair to ask, “So what? Is Democracy sacred, a best
of all possible societies? Why should any of us be worried if it changes into a
dictatorship?”

I worry because it seems to me that Democracy,
particularly a liberal Democracy such as America became, despite increasing counter-pressures,
between the late 1950s and the election of 2016, provides an opportunity for
all souls to grow and develop according to their own lights. And that, it seems
to me, is in accordance with a Divine Plan, if there is such a thing, to evolve
life forms with increasing ability to live in harmony with each other rather
than in a state of Nature which the predatory and ostentatious capitalism of
the Trump Regime is pushing as a social philosophy.

We couldn’t be more out of step with loftier principles
of human activity than we are with Trump, whose regime glorifies cash over
character, popularity over substance, and who is greeted everywhere with false
smiles currying favor in the hope that the rich, boorish American will drop a
bundle of those coveted American dollars before he leaves for his next stop on
his historical tour of our allies, European and Mid-eastern.

By the time he comes home we understand that American
interests have shifted. Our rulers are no longer interested in preserving and
carrying forward an historical tradition dating back at least 5,000 years. Like
the radical groups that blow up cultural icons of competing religions, we as a
society have given permission to a rogue regime to explode the democratic ideals
I’ve seen growing over a lifetime.

The underlying vision directing history after the
disaster of World War II was toward cooperative unity among nations. One
day--perhaps we might even live to see it--humanity would become one race of
many cultures connected to everything we are, from the single cells that
emerged from “nothing” to the greatest souls who ever walked the planet and
taught us how to cope with our single-most common problem which we share with
everything that lives on Earth—mortality.

That illusion of unity is gone with the Trump Regime. But
what are we replacing it with? So far, amidst all the bluster and noise about
fake news and pity for poor picked-on Donald who’s way too terrific for the
jealous to endure, all we’ve got now is an inferior culture with a huge arsenal
of deadly weapons to blast anyone who tries to contradict us in the claim that
we are still the best country in the world.

Seems like we’re not in the mood to play with our old
friends. We’re tired of them. We like the idea of a strong man. Maybe a King.
Or an Emperor? Why not a competition among dictators for the role of Emperor of
Earth? We could hold televised auditions, online voting, and pick the Ruler of
the World like we pick winners on the Amateur Hour by who gets the highest
reading on the virtual applause meter.

Donald Trump would win. Believe me. And it’ll be
terrific.

But the art! What will happen to the art when boorish
wealth takes over the world? Will it disappear into private collections, even
in Europe?

Sometimes I feel most grateful for living in a
prosperous, cultured time, which I realize is rare in history. Sometimes I want
to weep to think that this era of privilege for others like me is ending, when
the treasures of culture were readily available to any student who could afford
a $250 round-trip plane ticket to Brussels. Sometimes I want to fight against the wave of
cultural ignorance that has gathered like a tsunami bearing down upon the Age
of Enlightenment, which enemies call a failure.

Maybe they’re right. Maybe history moves in circles, not
in a line. Maybe there’s no culture, however beautifully portrayed in art,
which compensates for human weakness and stupidity. Maybe life is a matter of a
few winners, who we admire, and many losers, who we dismiss with contempt.
Maybe we live, after all, in a state of Nature and Man is just a successful
species of primate whose time on the planet is short. Maybe we shouldn’t defend
people who don’t pay us for it. That’s what any minimally rational animal in
the jungle would decide.

Or maybe we’re just passing through “the Trump Hump,” as
Jala named it, when progress toward an interdependent world must pause, must
wait for those who don’t yet accept global inclusion to get over their anger
and insecurity, change their minds, and come along willingly. If the Trump
Regime falls under its own weight of inefficiency, corruption, nepotism, lies,
and dictatorial tendencies, we’ll have another chance to rethink what we’ve
done to our Democracy by electing this shrewd but Ugly American as our
President.

But if the Regime somehow survives and succeeds, in its
own terms, we’ll be in a new era where Democracy loses ground to authoritarian
control and a huge majority of us become serfs in a new feudalism.

It’s too early to tell which way, if either, it’s going.
But if I had to choose another place to live to escape an ugly regime, I’d
choose southern Europe for the weather and for the art.

In the meantime, welcome home to America, Donald, where culture has yet to fully penetrate.
I know you don’t feel it quite as we did back in 1964, but, as someone once
said, it takes a lot of history to make a great civilization. We’re obviously
not there yet. Hopefully you’re a wake-up call, not a trumpet sounding Taps.

Sunday, April 30, 2017

A Westerner’s Journey to the East

Can Mindful MeditationOvercome Trumpism?

Raised as I was by a rational mother who educated herself
by reading the world’s great books, I was discouraged from pursuing meditation.
Paraphrasing Carl Jung, my mother believed that meditation was an eastern
thing—passive and inwardly directed—whereas western man’s nature is active and
outwardly directed. Therefore an American or European who meditates is as out
of place in his culture as an Indian selling life insurance might have been in
his.

At least that’s the way it was before the eastern gurus
began sending their best and brightest to England and America to teach we
highly amped westerners how to cool our over-heated frontal lobes with the practice
of yoga meditation. Exactly what western man was not supposed to do!

But there was no turning back the hemispheric change,
which entered our pop culture in the 1960s and ‘70s as a further, safer step
beyond psychedelic drugs—a viable if less spectacular substitute for getting
high—and best of all it was free. You didn’t have to score. You became your own
supplier.

Jose Silva

My first introduction to what I’d call entry-level
meditation was an editorial assignment for a weekly alternative newspaper to
cover a week-long workshop in a program called Alpha Awareness. It was a
generic brand of Silva Mind Control, run by a former Silva instructor who’d in
some way rebranded his master’s product without legal challenge and now
traveled about offering a Silva course under a new name and a discounted price.
A couple dozen people turned out to avail themselves of the bargain.

For my part, I took to Alpha Awareness like the
proverbial duck-to-water and practiced it regularly for five or six
years—counting down to my “level,” establishing my laboratory with its
beachfront view, relaxing completely in my own safe space, watching the flow of
scenes and faces streaming by my closed eyes as I tried, according to
instructions, to program my subconscious mind to manifest my desires.

Before long I went through a career change from part-time
journalist to part-time playwright and actor in my own community theater
company which then evolved into hired actor and playwright working for several
different theaters in our locality.

To supplement my irregular income in theater, which was
generally less than my desires, if not my needs, allowed, I found a job that
required more of my attention than the deep relaxation of self-hypnosis
provided. I began to work as an art school model. For the next dozen years I
met my day-to-day expenses by offering my nude body to college students, many
of them fine arts majors, to draw, paint, and sculpt for what was for me at the
time a pretty good hourly wage.

Think This Is Easy?

But to reach that level of success where I was under
contract or on call at half a dozen college art departments, I had to pass
through an initiation into radical mindfulness. Holding an interesting pose
without moving for twenty, thirty, forty minutes, even up to an hour, is a
practice in itself. In time I learned to breathe into all the pockets of pain
developing in my body as a pose went on. I learned to relieve the aches with
the subtlest of motions that, even with all the eyes of a class upon me, no one
detected. This required a near-laser focus on my body in space at any given
moment, rushing relief to any distressed part like a nurse on call. Emergency!
Cramp in left thigh!

Aside from addressing my muscle aches and numb limbs from
blocked circulation, I spent many an hour in art class over those years in a
rarefied space where hallucinations danced on the walls—wagon trains, animal
faces, Egyptian princesses and African dancers, images of people I’d never met,
occasionally of people I knew. It was liberating, in a strange way—to be so confined
in body yet so free in my mind. It reminded me of The Hanged Man card in the
Tarot deck, a paradox containing a reward worth a lot more than ten or fifteen
bucks an hour to me.

And it all came about from a fixed attention on my
breath—in and out, in and out. Nothing dramatic, just a very slowly developing
cumulative effect.

In the mid-1990s I began practicing a sit-down meditation
of at least 20 minutes every morning and evening, following instructions
periodically mailed from Self-Realization Fellowship, an institution founded by
Paramahansa Yogananda to transmit the teachings and practices of his line of
Hindu gurus to the spiritually ignorant West.

Yogananda

Yogananda, by all accounts an
enlightened master himself, came to America from India in the early 20th
century and became popular as a teacher, writer, and lecturer on religious and
metaphysical subjects.

Practicing these mail-order lessons for three years left
me rather devout, but the organization putting them out disappointed me for its
orthodoxy. After Yogananda passed away, it seemed his breadth of spirit also
passed away from the institution he’d founded. That seems to happen regularly
between master and disciples.

Following my own regimen, then, I continued meditating
daily into the millennium and beyond, a practice supported when I joined a
Buddhist sangha focused on the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, the
internationally known Vietnamese monk who has spread his gentle brand of Zen
Buddhism around the world.

Thich Naht Hanh

Under his absentee guidance and supported by my new
Buddhist friends, I rode the mindfulness wave onto the shores of 2017, where
living mindfully in the present is all the rage. Even my local TV station
advertises its commitment to the Now.

Meanwhile, after years of “the Practice,” I’m finding
that meditative mindfulness, like water dripping on a stone, has hollowed out a
dent in my consciousness so that I actually walk around during the day with my
mind in the present a good bit of the time.

Or, I should say, I did, before Donald Trump. Now there’s
a new challenge—to stay present and mindful as the world as I’ve known it from
my earliest days collapses around me. Can I survive, let alone thrive, in a
world run on cut-throat business principles?

Needs No Caption

It’s a rude awakening. Change is
coming down like lightning strikes bouncing along Tornado Alley from Minneapolis to Baton Rouge. The barbarians have taken the Capitol. The Age of
Enlightenment is canceled.

But I am committed to my practice above all because of a
set habit going back forty years to Alpha Awareness and the forms that came
after and also because, as an antidote to ease the anxiety of mortality, it
works. However dire or catastrophic the circumstances, remembering to
breathe—to open that mental door to the memory of the meditative state—immediately
breaks the spell of doom that seizes my mind when serious obstacles loom. A
second breath, and then a third, secures the shift. This simple practice brings
a wider, potentially cosmic perspective to the issues that unnecessarily roil
the majority population.

Meditation helps us to see clearly through our fears. Our
world never needed that more.

Wednesday, April 12, 2017

The Popularity of Hell

Why Politicians Love War

Now we know, if we didn’t before. For me, it was good to
have my memory refreshed. I’d lost perspective in the political tsunami of the
past year, forgotten my basic ABCs of non-partisan truth. Once Bernie Sanders,
who best represented my political views, was bumped off the bus, the election
for me became a defensive measure to keep Donald Trump’s hands off the levers
of power.

When that strategy failed and the inconceivable happened,
I lost all sense of a political base for myself. The right-wing corporatists
had finally taken over. All those heart-warming policies, like letting more
people with non-violent offenses out of jail early, going easy on illegal
immigrants and pot smokers, requiring non-discrimination in public facilities,
granting equal protection under the law to sexual minorities—all those policies
of mercy Obama put in place, inadequate as they may have been in truly
relieving suffering, poverty, and a poisoned environment—are suddenly wiped
away, and gone with them are many more protections and charitable measures to
help ordinary people struggling in an increasingly top-heavy economy.

The Democrats raised hell about all this, of course, but
how many of them will give up their corporate donors—who have become their
social friends—to embrace humane policies already in place in every other major
industrial democracy? Almost none.

So they hedged. They always hedge. They’ve hedged so long
they’ve lost their relevance.

Curiously, though, when it comes to war, there is very
little hedging, very little partisan divide. As the news broke of Trump’s
“decisive” action against the contemptible Assad regime, Democrats fell in behind him and
his gang like mindless robotoids. “He did the right thing,” a block of them
agreed, “but he should have asked us first.” The news media, of course, noted
how the Democrats seemed more supportive of the attack than many Republicans.

What message does that send to us, the people, when two
sides who would rather slit one another’s throats than back one another’s ideas
suddenly become comrades-in-arms, cheering on the peerless leader for his act
of war and only criticizing him for not letting them approve it first?
Obviously, they would have approved it.

The message I get is that the Democratic Party is no
place for me or any true democrat who supports the franchise for all citizens
of age, which we now set at 18. Maybe there should be a Voters Rights wing
within the Democratic Party to distinguish Democrats who uphold full participatory
democracy from Democrats who want to keep the corporate thumb on the scale,
just to assure that “the People” don’t get too much power through the electoral
process.

That strategy didn’t work so well in the last election,
but Democrats show little sign of giving it up. Chuck Schumer’s rails against
the Republican agenda come across like the rants of an impotent goat butting
his own image inside a bank vault. You almost have to laugh at what a clown act
he’s putting on.

What will it take for politicians to recognize and
correct the imbalances in our society caused by the unequal distribution of
wealth and power? We spend so much of what we have to assure ourselves that
we’re ready for war that we have little left to make peace in our own land.
War—or its domestic equivalent of police shootings and citizen
reprisals—becomes a default position, not a last resort, in a society permeated
with fear and paranoia because of our monumental failure to get along with each
other.

We need to disarm before we can dispel our fears. That’s
counterintuitive, I know, and I know that even with hands up—or arms open—you
can still get killed by a nervous cop, who will likely get away with it. But
more weapons, more high-tech killer bombers and drones—all that war stuff that
costs so much money, some portion of which finances friendly
politicians—that’s what we can count on
Democrats and Republicans coming together to protect. They are the War Party,
always a majority, always a priority. War is the common ground of our elected
government, and it has been for decades. It’s the one issue politicians
consistently cross party lines to agree on, and not by slim majorities, either.
Peace is political suicide.

But it’s very disappointing to consider that of the great
many human activities supported by government, war is the most popular of them
all.

How can that be? Few disagree that war is hell. Is it a
human thing to prefer hell when there’s an idea called heaven available? If we
can create hell on Earth with war, it seems we could do at least as well in
realizing its opposite, just by figuring out what hell is not. And then funding
that.

Hell is not love, for instance. Hell is not comfort. Hell
is not generous or kind to strangers. Hell is the opposite of everything that
warms your heart or gives you pleasure. You can fill in the list for yourself.

If we spent half as much money addressing the causes of
war as we now do on the preparations, chances are at least even that the risk
of war would decrease, maybe even significantly. But we need better politicians
on both sides than the ones we’ve got now or we’ll never see the end of war,
though we may see the end of a lot of other things we’ve come to value,
including the whole Enlightenment-era idea of America. It still shocks me how
many of our people don’t even know what that is.

Then again, maybe I’m the one who doesn’t get it. Maybe
the Enlightenment experiment is over. Maybe it ended when a black man, defined
in the Constitution as three-fifths of a person, became President of the United States, fulfilling America’s enlightened destiny in the nightmarish hell of
history.

And now that play is over. A new drama, a thriller, has
opened on the world stage.

If people like the nightmare—the thrills and chills and
clashes of passions that keep us ever on edge behind locked doors—more power to
them. But if they don’t, they should lay down their arms. That’s the
alternative I’m working on. It’s not a single action, either. It’s a way of
life.

Thursday, April 06, 2017

The Thinking Dog Barks

Breaking Silence on Donald Trump

Since the election of Donald Trump, I’ve had nothing to
say in this space. What can I add to the noise that isn’t an echo?

Now, though, it seems that even an echo is of some value,
because as a country, as a democratic system however flawed, we’ve crossed a
line, and more people have to say it. Not that “getting back” is an option. You
can never go back, any more than you can stop going forward. But you can try to see where we are and where we might be going from there.

And some things become less opaque when you shut up,
keep your eyes open, and listen.

Having done so for the past four months and counting, I
see hysteria on all sides. Exaggeration draws conclusions that wheel out of
control, emotions flare which exaggerate the exaggerations, and very soon
alternative realities begin to clash in public spaces, eventually inviting an
excuse for riot police and perhaps martial law.

So I want to calm down from all that.

We know that America is divided—about 50-50 between conservative and
liberal, right and left. In our politics that settles in as Republican and
Democrat, red and blue. But to leave it at that doesn’t get to the essence of
the “great schism” in America, as trend-tracker Stephen Schwartz names the
split. Our political parties only reflect the divide imperfectly. They don’t
necessarily define it.

The real divide is between mercy and severity, qualities
of consciousness. Excessive mercy enables liberality and moral decay, which
triggers severity—a crack-down. Too much severity cries out for mercy—a
liberalization of the laws. These forces work like two poles of a constantly
active pendulum.

But, speaking as an American, it’s a pendulum few
Americans understand is always operating beneath events. The die-hard
law-and-order types represent severity, a quality always with us, as are the
anarchists and libertines who thrive under the liberality of mercy. Getting the
balance right in a society and in a world of constant crisis—caused precisely
because we haven’t yet got the balance right—is the struggle I see in happening
in America, where the ideal of equality among citizens once
led the world but is now fallen like an eagle with a broken wing.

Basically, we Americans can’t agree about who to punish and
who to reward. But it seems many of us agree that the curse of poverty is the
fault of the poor, which of course implies its opposite, that the rich deserve
their bounty. This is old-time Puritan Calvinism. Did you think it went out
with the Salem witch trials?

Donald Trump is no angel. Morally, he’s black as coal, by
his own public admissions. But he’s rich. And if he’s rich he must be
successful. It seems the average American is easily seduced by people who
appear successful because they’re rich. Obviously a great many American voters
overlooked Trump’s outrageous lies and unbecoming behavior because he
represented something they admire more than squeaky clean. They admire ostentatious,
untraceable, bottomless wealth. If we had all the money in the world, wouldn’t
we be happy! That’s the shadow side of American free enterprise, which we’ve
now entered, like an eclipse of our dream, to be realized in full with the
election of the present government.

Having been seduced by the siren song of a proudly “successful
businessman” whose opulence we envy, Americans are now learning what it means
to change the concept of the U.S. chief executive from President—the one who
presides over the government—to CEO—corporate executive officer, the one who
runs the government.

As has been noted by others, a corporate executive is a
dictator. He may be merciful or he may be severe, but he’s the one who says
what’s what. That’s the structure of corporate life, which runs from the top
down. It’s at odds with the U.S. government structure, which is a (limited)
democracy. The balance of power crafted into our Constitution requires a
political process to enable a President. A President is not free to do as he
pleases, and legislators, unlike corporate minions, are not free to betray the
interests of their constituents. If they break the bargain, they lose their
jobs, in a perfect world.

But the new men in Washington, backed by enough voters to put them there, don’t
care about the old values of democracy. They are businessmen, corporate
creatures, and they are not going to save us, they are going to try to mold us
into corporate citizens who do what we’re told or we’re out in the cold.

A National Identity Crisis

This is a national identity crisis. What America really stands for is in the balance. Are we for
profit (severity) or non-profit (mercy)? Do we believe more in human rights
(mercy) or states’ rights (severity)? Do we offer the impoverished a hand up
(mercy) or a kick in the face (severity)? How you feel about distributing
wealth? Should we lead by example or by force? Where is the balance between
mercy and severity which will satisfy a voting majority of Americans in fair,
ungerrymandered elections?

With Trump & Co., we’re at a point where Americans
will either capitulate to our new corporate state and the changes it will bring
to our national mission and way of life, or we will turn back the forces of
corporate rule by electing politicians with better ideas of social organization
than bottom-line, top-down despotism with the protection of wealth its highest
priority.

The outcome is truly unpredictable. It all depends on how
far we’ve gone down the road to oligarchy. In that dictatorial rule by a
coterie of the very rich who run society as a for-profit business, people can
be hired or fired at will with no recourse to a court of appeals to reverse the
executive decision. No unemployment benefits, either.

In the next year or two, I read in persuasive sources,
our CEO will likely be fired himself on a variety of charges, and then the real
corporate enablers, already in place, will take over. President Pence will be no
friend to democracy, but if we decide to go forward as a corporate state he’ll
be the perfect front man and do everything he’s told. He’s proven his
willingness to serve a boss without question, an uncanny ability to spin straw
into gold for the benefit of the privileged.

My hope, of course, is that a majority of Americans won’t
stand for it—stripping the poor of all assistance, letting corporations operate
practically tax-free, charging the elderly extra for healthcare while cutting their Social Security benefits, criss-crossing the country with leaking oil pipe lines and earth-quaking fracking. Are they going to cut aid to war widows and orphan, too? Just wait, Paul Ryan's got the plan.

A word about Ryan, a college sophomore mentality blinded
by his attachment to “conservative principles,” which seem to involve loyalty
above all to a balanced federal budget. I’m not one to argue about economics,
having dropped the course like a hot potato in college, but my understanding is
that the United States is still the richest country on Earth, and if “conservative
principles” were as important to Ryan as he says, there should be no problem with saving money with healthcare for all or demanding the Department of
Defense cut its enormous waste, as everyone knows exists in the military.

It seems it would also be cheaper to preserve our natural
resources rather than squander them on short-term, profit-generating projects
that create wealth for a few in the present and misery for the many in the long
run. I’m so tempted to scream into the wind, “What the fuck is wrong with us?”

But I will exercise Buddha-like restraint and only say, I’m
quite sure we’ll come together one day, when enough of us agree we’ve had
enough. I only hope I live to see that day.